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Protecting workload data in VCF as a Service with VCDA

Protecting workload data in VCF as a Service with VCDA

Deliver simple, secure, and cost-effective disaster recovery support with VMware Cloud Director Availability (VCDA).

Both disaster recovery and migration support are available when you install the VCDA service. For more information about migration scenarios, see Migrating workloads to VCF as a Service with VCDA.

The VCDA service is included by default in all multitenant virtual data centers (VDCs) and optionally included in your single-tenant VCF as a Service Cloud Director site order. For a VCDA disaster recovery configuration, a monthly charge is incurred per protected virtual machine (VM).

With the VCDA service, you can replicate workloads from a source VCF as a Service environment over to a second VCF as a Service environment. Replicating VMware workloads protects the workloads if a disaster with the source VMware environment where workloads can fail over and run on the second VMware environment. The workload replication frequency is configurable by default to as low as every five minutes. The number of replications to maintain can range from 1 to 24. Optionally, you can open an IBM Cloud support ticket to request that replications are reduced down to as low as one minute.

You can create the following disaster recover configurations.

  • VCF as a Service single-tenant or multitenant to VCF as a Service single-tenant or multitenant environments
  • On-premises to VCF as a Service environments
  • VMware Cloud Foundation for Classic to VCF as a Service environments

For a tutorial on how to create a disaster recovery configuration that uses a VCF as a Service single-tenant instance as the primary workload environment and a VCF as a Service multitenant instance as the disaster recovery environment, see Configuring disaster recovery with VMware Cloud Director Availability.

For more information about installing VCDA on-premises, see Installing VCDA on-premises in VMware vCenter Server.

Accessing the VMware Cloud Director Availability console

When you are ready to complete your data recovery configuration, you can access the VCDA console from the Add-on services tab of a virtual data center instance details page for both multitenant and single-tenant instances.

Procedure to access the VMware Cloud Director Availability console from the instance

  1. In the VMware Solutions console, click Resources > VCF as a Service from the left navigation pane.
  2. Click the Virtual data center tab. Then, click the instance name.
  3. Click the Add-on services tab on the instance details page.
  4. On the VMware Cloud Director Availability service, click Open VCDA.
  5. Use a user with the Organization Administrator role to log in to the VCDA console. A newly provisioned virtual data center's admin user has the role by default.

Alternatively, you can access the VCDA console through the Cloud Director site details page. For more information, see Viewing migration details.